THE 1ST ANTIPSYCHOTIC
Chlorpromazine is a drug that many used to call Thorazine, and it was used as one of the first significant antipsychotics in psychiatry. In 1954, the drug was first introduced into medicine as one of the first drugs that will allow schizophrenics to lead a healthy life outside of mental institutions. Many doctors that first tested the drug on their patients wrote that the drug produced around the same effects as a lobotomy. Heinz Lehmann, a psychiatrist in North America during this time, tested the drug on his patients and noted that it caused them to become slow and unresponsive, producing a vegetative-like state.
Others who tested the drug produced quite similar results to Lehmann, psychiatrists noted that it caused patients who were previously very agitated or anxious became all of a sudden relaxed. Since the introduction of neuroleptics, it seemed as if they would not cause long term effects on patients.
When chlorpromazine was used in mental patients it caused symptoms that resembled Parkinson’s and encephalitis lethargica. The terrifying aspect is that these mental patients were having side effects due to the abnormally high dosages of Chlorpromazine that they were receiving. Nathan Kline was a psychiatrist in New York and noted that using dosages that were extreme for longer periods of time was needed to ensure that their treatment was productive.
This became the new normal for treatment of mentally ill patients, specifically schizophrenics. The question “how?” arises and the answer seems to be the most intriguing; due to the fact that mental patients lacked in competency, they lacked consent. Doctors said that they were in fact not competent to make the decisions for themselves, so they took over their treatment. Patients refusing treatment lead doctors to produce Thorazine into an odorless and clear-less liquid that could be placed in the patient’s food and drinks without their knowledge.
Janet Gotkin, a subject to these Thorazine experiments, spoke out against her treatment in a Senate hearing in 1975 and wrote a book recounting the horrors. For ten years, she was prescribed 2,000 milligrams of Thorazine a day which gave her Parkinson’s symptoms that had to be treated with a medication that yielded more side effects. She spoke of how throughout her treatment she could not live, yet survive, anywhere outside a psychiatric hospital where her own body was a prisoner to. Gotkin’s story is just one of many that were subject to the unethical experimentation that occurred in the testing of one of the first antipsychotic drugs that were invented.
Sources:
Kline, Nathan. “Psychopharmaceuticals: Uses and Abuses,” Postgraduate Medicine 27 (1960):621.
“Thorazine.” Beaufort Memorial Hospital, www.bmhsc.org/health-and-wellness/education-support/health-library/article?productId=50&pid=50&gid=642.
Winkelman NW. CHLORPROMAZINE IN THE TREATMENT OF NEUROPSYCHIATRIC DISORDERS. JAMA. 1954;155(1):18–21. doi:10.1001/jama.1954.03690190024007
Whitaker, Robert. Mad in America: Bad Science, Bad Medicine, and the Enduring Mistreatment of the Mentally Ill. Cambridge, MA: Perseus Pub, 2002. Print.